Thought you might also find it interesting, cuz that's why (one reason) we back up our drives with images. I've never been able to find data like this before.

Here's a quote:

The bigger issue, according to Gibson, isn't SMART attributes or the effect of temperature on performance, but the fact that drives fail too often. "Failure rates are always much higher than the manufacturers claim," he says, pointing to Google's data showing an annual failure rate of eight percent for drives in service for two years. That might not sound high, but it's one out of every twelve drives.

I wonder how the failure rates of hard disk drives vary by manufacturer. For example, Seagate has purchased Maxtor, and has positioned the Maxtor brand as a low-end, consumer device; reserving the Seagate designation for its high-end devices. As a consequence, one would expect (?) that failure rates among Maxtor drives would be greater than those of Seagate drives.

Whatever the absolute failure rates might be, the lesson is still clear: be prepared or be sorry. Image backup is a wise strategy. Human nature being what it is, I am not optimistic that the data reported in these studies will alter the reluctance that the ‘average user’ has toward image backup, unfortunately. When facts encounter human perceptions and habits, the latter always prevail.

ple • o • nasm n. “The use of more words than are required to express an idea”

No doubt losing a drive can be a devastating loss, not to mention the time it takes to re-install your O/S, programs & configure everything back to the way it was.

I feel the performance of all drives for any given spindle speed are close enough that the primary purchasing criteria should be drive reliability. Of course, it wasn't until after losing a few drives that I came to this philosophy.

That's why I've always been interested in this type of data.. altho they (sadly) do not reference any particular manufacturers.

So I've been forced to employ my *own* experiences with drives to determine which drives I prefer .. and I (so far) like Seagate drives best. That's all I've been buying lately.